Collaborative web browsing enables different participants to have the same synchronized view on the web content displayed, for example they should see each others mouse pointers and a current web page. A use case for a collaborative web browsing session is for example when an insurance clerk helps a customer to fill out a form on a web page. The clerk should be able to see the customer's view on the web page and vice versa. A further use case is for example a call center: In call centers today it is required that audio and/or video calls can be recorded for future service improvements and/or legal reasons.
For performing collaborative web browsing a standard browser to access the service is sufficient, i.e. browser plugins or browser extensions are not required.
For example in U.S. Pat. No. 7,441,000 B2, in US 2009/0164581 A1 or in US 2012/0159305 A1 conventional methods and systems for performing cobrowsing sessions are shown.
One of the disadvantages is, that they do not support recording and replaying of cobrowsing sessions. A further disadvantage is that they do not give editors like web editors of a web page or participants in the multiuser web session a fine-grain control of recording.
To overcome this problem one of the conventional solutions is to take a video of the screen and record it, for example with the tool “snagit”, available under <<http://www.techsmith.com/snagit.html>>. However one disadvantage of such a solution recognized by the inventors is that proprietary software has to be installed and the video data in particular of a longer cobrowsing session is very huge. Therefore it is impracticable to store such an amount of video data. Furthermore this conventional solution is very inflexible: The video cannot be changed and it is impracticable to analyze the stored video, for example to make optimizations for a customer service. Even further only a view of one participant can be stored, i.e. if a plurality of views are to be stored the view of each participant has to be stored leading to a huge amount of data to be saved.